What I want to do: Connect to the internet through my wifi router, via some other router that the room I rent provides.
What I have: 1 ethernet cable that comes into my apartment.
If I plug the ethernet cable into my computer it will work fine. I'm guess DHCP gives me my ip address and viola, 192.168.1.1 is my gateway (and I can see some router admin page that I have no control over or ownership of). Howver, if I plug this same ethernet cable into my otherwise working wifi router (have done this kind of setup before in the past) it fails to connect to the internet. I am using dd-wrt and it is set to Gateway mode and to use DHCP as the connection type.
I noticed that when my router is plugged in, it does not have a gateway ip set (perhaps because it is the gateway) for what it's worth.
edit: This is in Thailand. I suspect the LAN cable goes directly to the WAN and not through a modem. Not sure.